He is also a staff psychiatrist at the Durham VA Medical Center. His academic interests include the philosophy of psychiatric diagnosis, the way that religious communities care for persons with mental illness, theological approaches to trauma, and the teaching of medical professionalism.
At Duke, Dr. Kinghorn is active in the teaching and supervision of psychiatric residents and students in the Medical Center, and also in the formation and teaching of theological students in the Divinity School. He is a core faculty member of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture program at Duke Divinity School, and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health at Duke University Medical Center.
As a Faculty Scholar, Dr. Kinghorn will be engaging the conceptual work of St. Thomas Aquinas together with modern psychological scholarship in order to articulate a psychologically-informed theology of human flourishing which will speak to the needs of physicians and of the communities which physicians serve. He will be integrating this conceptual work into a new program at Duke Divinity School titled “Reimagining Medicine,” which will seek to engage clinicians, congregations, and healthcare institutions in a theologically rich, collaborative “reimagining” of medicine as a sustainable moral practice.